Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The White House's social media is deranged

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Since Trump took office, the official White House social media accounts have been posting a bit… differently. Drew Harwell, my former colleague at The Washington Post, has been covering the Trump White House's digital strategy.Today, he joins me to unpack the White House's hyper-online social media cruelty, the inner workings of its digital team, how the Trump administration has transformed its traditional press shop into a rapid-response influencer operation, and how the Democratic Party is responding in the online arena. ***************This episode of Power User is brought to you by DeleteMe. Data brokers collect your info and sell it to anyone. Start protecting yourself today by going to joindeleteme.com/TAYLOR20 and using code TAYLOR20 at checkout for 20% off!***************Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.usermag.coSubscribe to my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorLorenz Follow me on IG: https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social 

Here we are again, right? It's a second presidency, second term, and they are dominating our discussions. Yeah, and part of that is their social media. Since Trump took office in January, the official White House social media accounts have been posting a bit differently. On Valentine's Day, the White House's Instagram account posted a card that read, quote, roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and will deport you. The meme was accompanied by photos of Donald Trump and borders are Tom Homan. A few days later, the White House posted an ASA, SMR-style deportation video.

The video was titled ASMR Deportation Flight, and it depicted immigrants and shackles boarding a plane with amplified sounds of chains and footsteps. The very next day, they posted an AI-generated image of President Trump wearing a giant gold crown with a caption, Congestion pricing is dead. Manhattan and all of New York is saved.

Long live the king. And finally, just a couple weeks ago, the White House posted another bizarre video using the semi-sonic song Closing Time while a person was being deployed The band responded by saying that no one from the White House had sought approval to use that song, and that's not at all what the song is about. Drew Harwell, my former colleague at The Washington Post, has been covering the White House's digital strategy. Today, he joins me to unpack the White House's bizarre new social media presence, the inner workings of its digital team,

how the Trump administration has transformed its traditional press shop into a rapid response influencer operation, and how the Democratic Party is responding in the online arena. Hi, Drew, welcome to Power User. Hey, Taylor. How you doing? So you wrote this great story about Trump's social media strategy. I feel like during Trump's first presidency, I certainly didn't know that much. I feel like there was just Dan Skavino in there tweeting random things. It seemed very haphazard.

This time it seems like a much more strategic effort. Can you talk to me a little bit about how the social team within the White House is structured currently? Yeah, it was really haphazard. And it was a much smaller team, much less organized. Now there's basically a core squad of like a dozen, you know, young creative people who have a bunch of ideas. They share ideas really quickly. They can produce them and, you know, put the content out really quickly. People who are like clippers, you know, who are watching live video, pulling segments out, posting them online as quickly as possible to start building up that viral attention.

There's people who are kind of writing the tweets and Instagram posts that are going out there. There's image designers who are, you know, putting photos out that align with the political message. These are normal kinds of operations for companies in America or campaigns. It's not something we've ever had from the White House institutional standpoint. There was this moment at Baltimore VidCon a few years ago when Christian Tom, who was the previous digital director, got on stage in front of all these creators and said, actually, President Biden is the biggest White House content creator and that they had this social, this, you know, innovative social media strategy, I guess, behind the Biden White House team to,

you know, put their messaging out online. How does the Trump social media strategy and team differ from, you know, what we had before and what we saw under Biden? That moment was funny because President Biden did not fit that role well at all, right? They tried to force it. And, you know, there was content made with President Biden. He seemed game to try it. They tried dark Biden stuff. They had videos with Joe Biden. With President Trump, they've really leaned into that and he fits that mold better because we know, you know, from his first presidency, he tweeted all the time, he posted jokes, he posted attacks, he had the poster spirit, as one would say. And he just understood it more innately, even though both of these guys are

similar in age. Trump was just seemingly more comfortable with it. And actually last year, during the campaign, when his team was starting to think about joining TikTok, they had seen that there was already a base of support for Trump on TikTok, but he hadn't had an account, had been awkward because, of course, during his first presidency, he tried to ban TikTok, but he'd come around and they created an account. And at the time, they were saying, Trump is not just a politician. He's a celebrity entertainer. He has this past in TV. He has this audience that just loves what he's saying, regardless of the politics. And so they basically try to double down on that in a social media format. So they,

use his punch lines, his attack lines, you know, the fierce things he says about his political enemies, his media enemies, and also his, you know, side of humor and the weird stuff he says all the time. Trump is not editing the videos that go out on TikTok, but he is the star in every single video. And he seems to understand that. He seems to really relish the opportunity to be himself. And we saw this during the campaign, too, where he was doing these long, multi-hour podcast interviews, he was just really accepting that moment and leaning into it. And now he's become this even beyond the presidency and influencer all his own. He's always been our first real influencer president, for sure, I would argue. So it sounds like Trump is starring in a lot more content.

And it's a lot more like centered personally on him than maybe under the Biden administration where it was more about his policies and the people around him. I also feel like there's a lot more acknowledgement of digital trends. I think there was that like ASMR deportation video. or something, but they seem really willing to like engage in these kind of niche formats. Can you talk about that? After the inauguration, when the Trump team started, and this is a digital team that's based out of the White House, you started to see these posts and videos come out that were, again, nothing like we'd ever seen from the White House, especially around immigration,

where they posted on Valentine's Day a Valentine with, you know, Trump's face and the face of Borders are Tom Homan saying, you know, roses are red, violins. are blue, come into this country illegally, and will deport you. It's basically this meme that you would see in a lot of different formats, but here it's applied to deportation and immigration and all these very cruel kind of policies that are very tough and very, and they were applying that kind of absurdity to that and it got a bunch of views from people who supported it and people who hated it. They also did, yeah, the ASMR video.

It's a very meditative video that's all about, you know, giving you that tingling sensation with these very peaceful sounds. And they applied that to what they called an illegal alien deportation flight. So you see this giant transport jet, you hear the jet engines, you see the handcuffs, you hear the chains, and you see these men who are being kind of marched onto a plane

to be deported out of the country to who knows where. As liberals would say, the cruelty is the point, right? They would say this is a really harsh way to talk about deportations. These are people's lives. From a content perspective, no matter what you feel about the policy, that is an effective strategy to get their message out. So when the White House saw that, they were like, yeah, let's do more of that.

Let's keep pushing the boundaries because it's working. Stephen Chung, I think you say his name, is communications director. He said that the goal, according to your article, is full spectrum dominance. What does that mean in terms of their strategy? Full spectrum. They're not just on TV. They're not just on radio. They're not just owning the headlines on print and websites, but they're all over social media, too, right?

They're everything anyone can talk about. We remember from the first presidency, Trump would tweet and every newsroom would scramble to write about it. And even if they were fact checking it, Trump was in the news. And that helped make him the main character of every news cycle every day. And now here we are again, right? It's a second presidency, second term. And they are dominating our discussions. Yeah.

And part of that is their social media. Yeah, but I guess like what's different. Because to me, like what you're saying, it sounds like a lot of the things that Democrats have tried to do. So why is it, aside from that they're being overly inflammatory and cruel, what is it that they're actually sort of like materially doing differently than what Democrats have done? Yeah, I think tangibly they're just leaning into, I mean, video, right? Like photo, video, kind of the modern ways that people process information. They're posting short videos. They're doing, you know, direct to camera talk. So they're on the cutting edge on that as opposed to

just sort of like fact check graphs and tweets from from past campaign. They're unapologetic. I mean, the White House team leader that I talked to said, we basically see it as kind of like smash mouth football. And that's very aggressive, very combative, like in your face all the time. They're not quibbling or debating over policy. They're not recognizing nuance. It's just we're going to hit you in the face with the message and the political talking point we want to get across over and over again. And if you agree with us, that's great. If you don't agree with us, maybe you'll see it so much that you'll start to agree with us. But that is, that's a is the underlying philosophy. I mean, you talk a lot about video and obviously they're doing so much on TikTok and all of these sort of video first platforms, but it also seems like X has become such a hub for political communication in the White House specifically. Can you talk about like X's role in their content strategy and like how important is that platform? It seems like that is like their primary, I guess, like mode of attack or like that's where they're doing a lot of this rapid response stuff. X is the platform of the right. It's where every right wing provocateur, every

influencer is they use the other platforms in different ways, but X is, yeah, X is the spine of all of this. Which is kind of funny because, you know, during the first presidency, Twitter was the spine of all of Trump's communications, but there wasn't a huge right-wing presence there, right? And there was even then constantly talk about how Twitter was two left-wing. They had to leave for parlor and getter and gab and wherever else. But that is all gone under Elon Musk, right? And X is the place where that conversation happened. Trump is on there. Elon Musk is the most popular account there by far, and he's constantly

retweeting and reposting pro-Maga viewpoints. So yeah, and of course, X has changed to where, you know, there is more video there. And so while they are using the other platforms in kind of more tailored ways, X is a place where they know. They are, they can get virality and they can reach people. Now, the ex-constituency has changed a lot, too, where as more right-wing people have centralized there, a lot of left-wing people have left. But there's still enough of a mainstream presence in their mind that they can reach, you know, not just sort of partisans on either side, but as in the first presidency, a bunch of journalists who watch it. And in that case, you know, they're trying to reach those people so they can get into even the legacy media

presence and expand their attention that way. And what is the platform ecosystem like for them? I mean, are they still on parlor or rumble or like these other right-wing sites or have they sort of abandon that and they're just going mainstream now. Yeah, so they are on the other platforms. The White House opened like a Rumble account recently, so they're on Rumble. All of these have kind of single serve purposes. They're not gaining new fans from something like Rumble. They're preaching to the choir in a place like Rumble or they're using it, you know, to host video or that could, but X is still the place where it is their first stop for messaging. When you think of the White House and how successful it's been. I always contrast it with at the Democrats. Have you followed that account?

Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's run by the DNC. Every single time they post something is sort of like immediately dragged as cringe and out of touch. They did this really bad post inauguration weekend, I think, that was like a video of them printing a sweatshirt that said snowflake that they wanted to give to Donald Trump or something. Recently they also posted this like impossible to read image that had this like long list of accomplishments that they've done, but you could barely read it. People were comparing it to like the Dr. Brunner's bottle. What do you think it is about their account that isn't working when you, you know, like contrast it with something like the White House account? Because I feel like a lot of the stuff that they, that the Democrat at the Democrats post is like also trying to

lean into trends. It's equally as corny, but it's like corny to liberal. Like it's tailored towards liberals. So, you know, are they doing something off or wrong or is it just that they're speaking to liberals and everyone hates liberals right now? Probably a little bit of that. I think they're trying to please everyone all the time. And that is not a winning formula, as we've seen on social media, right? People want a perspective. They want a point of view. Even cringe stuff in work, if people believe the message, if it feels authentic.

Last year, the Democrats had this issue when Biden was running. And again, they tried to do kind of dark Biden. And they tried to be on the trend. But, you know, and I talk to people who were part of that operation, which ultimately became the Harris-Walls operation. And they were saying, you know, we didn't really change. We wanted to keep doing the kind of stuff we ended up doing through Kamala HQ. That was a lot more on trend. And that was more effective.

That was getting more viewership. But the connection to the principal, Joe Biden, was not there. It didn't feel right, right? Because it felt like there's this candidate and there's the team of Gen Z people who's attached to them. And they have to kind of make it seem like it worked. And it never really worked. And Kamala Harris came in and she was a little goofier. And so they could try a little more to make that connection seem real.

And they did. And they were posting all sorts of like goofy stuff that was going big on TikTok. And it was surprising to me after the Harris loss that they seemed to get away from that. And they kind of retrench back to this classic style of democratic messaging that was just often very boring. Like you said, I mean, that that post about their accomplishments was it was giving soap label. And that nobody, nobody wants to see that, right? even if you're agreeing with that, you have to understand this is information that's coming across in a fast scroll on a feed where you've got a thousand things competing for your attention.

It just doesn't work. I have actually been interested to watch the Democrats account in the last couple of days because they posted something a couple days ago that was just a single photo from the Trump, Elon Musk event where they're selling Teslas outside the White House. And the Democrats posted a photo of that, and they just did a three-word, caption, ugly-ass truck. It was shit posting, right? I mean, it was just kind of like absurd, but that post like did really well. People were sharing it. They're like, ha-ha, you know. And so it's like, this is not Lincoln Douglas debate here. This is not like scoring political points. But they're

like, they're trying. You can tell that they're trying to evolve that messaging. The Democrats also posted like this weird, what are those things called that are outside the car dealerships that they're like the balloon men. Oh, yeah, the wacky, waving, inflatable tube arm guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like on the front of the White House with a cyber truck. They're saying the White House is a big car lot. Yeah. I feel like it's a tempting shit posting. The problem that I think is sort of like what they seem to have online is like even that

tweet like ugly ass truck. I think that's more forceful than like any Democratic member of Congress has ever said. I feel like they have this deeply kind of like lame. I follow the rules like rhetoric from their actual lawmakers. And then they try to come online and like clap back and it just falls flat because it's like, It just doesn't seem like them. Political messaging, there is a reason why there are a lot of strategists in this space who act like they know what they're talking about or, you know, sell their services for this

because it's difficult to reach a lot of different types of audiences who all want different things. And, you know, with Trump, you have this central component of power. You have Trump and, you know, the White House team talked about this. They said, our job is easy because we just followed the lead of the big guy in the over office. Like, we know his attitude. We know he's going to be fiery and throwing out insults. Like, so we just copy that behavior. Whereas with the Democrats, like, who is the leader of the Democrats right now? What attitude should they be copying? And there's a lot, you know, should they be more like AOC? Should they be more like Chuck Schumer? You know, so there's, there's a disconnect there. And I think

maybe over time, maybe they'll find that. But it's, it's hard. And also, you have to reach different age ranges. People have to understand it at different tiers. But yeah, yeah, it's hard. I don't know. a lot of their problems are self-inflicted. Oh, it's so hard. Who can you listen to? I don't know. Maybe like the people that resonate with your base. I guess when you think about the Trump's social media strategy, they have this sort of like official rapid response accounts that are like these main accounts run by this team within the White House, like you mentioned. And then they've also embraced this influencer strategy. How does their sort of official White House strategy dovetail with that influencer strategy that they've been leveraging with the media? They're kind of parallel,

Well, but they're separate, too. You have the social media component that's trying to put out their own content, and then you have the quote-unquote new media side where they're trying to basically rebalance the power away from legacy media, the TV networks, the newspapers, over to, you know, the creators of news-related content, political influencers, mostly MAGA influencers, definitely, who they're welcoming into the White House press briefing room. They're allowing to ask questions in the Oval Office. That component is we're going to give you the material that you can then take into your own reports and give to your audience. And that hopefully we're going to get our message out that way. So are the White House people basically you're saying like packaging material for influencers or like distributing like content to influencers to distribute? Yeah, the White House team is definitely making its own content. They're expecting that those kinds of influencers will take that and kind of take that baton and run with it.

And there's also just the classic communication venues where there's the White House briefings, there's the lawn interviews. When you say White House briefings, like Biden obviously made news for a lot of his influencer briefings, like briefing TikTokers on Ukraine or climate or these other sort of issues. Is the White House holding similar briefings? I mean, I know we saw the report that they did with the Epstein files that weren't really the Epstein files, I guess. But are they briefing them on other issues or having, you know, calls with these groups of people? It is a little different than the Biden ones that you scooped, basically. As opposed to having specific briefings with just individual influencers, separate to that Epstein-Files one, which was kind of a debacle on its own, they've been allowing those MAGA influencers into the traditional spaces where it would have just been broadcast, newspaper or journalists. So they're kind of folding everybody in together. Now, I think they probably will start having more briefings with conservative influences.

You've seen people like Jack Posovia get like special. He's gone on trips, been invited to trips with Pete Higsef. And so I think you're going to be seeing more of it. But they've also just been trying to combine them because that builds up the clout and the authority for those new media influencers who are going to be basically repeating the administration's talking points already. So they understand that there's an opportunity to like multiply their messaging through these people who are not so much journalists as cheerleaders, like they're just going to repeat the message.

Yeah, I saw that something like 14,000 of them or something had applied for press credentials within the first week of them opening it up. How much of this is really that new? I mean, obviously, like Biden worked with influencers. Sure, they weren't in the exact briefing room. But, I mean, Trump throughout his first term, he had that social media summit. Obama had Viner's at the White House, like the first blogger, you know, was credentialed for in the White House press room in 2005. So how different is his influencer strategy really, you know, when compared to sort of, I guess, like previous precedents? It's really not so different. Yeah. And I think you can read some of the panic over these new media voices getting a place at the table

as being very repetitive of like the blogger panic from 20 years ago where there was this push and of legacy media journalists, you know, sometimes feeling like they're the only ones that can do it. They can do it better than the new media. I think the difference here is that this new generation of new media journalists, there are some who are more kind of down the center, but there are ones that are just very proudly, openly, pro maga, you know, that's part of their audience, right? They would never lie about that. And they are being welcomed into the room to ask questions of the White House and then, you know, a couple hours later go to an event where they're very openly supporting the policies that they were just reporting on. And so in that way, you know,

in the past it was kind of like new media was doing traditional journalism using new tools, whereas this is, it's not traditional journalism. It's a kind of political infused, you know, advocacy creation that is using the tools and also is kind of being welcomed in these spaces where it was past reporting. But yeah, it really is very similar. And the White House would agree with you. I mean, from the White House's perspective, and they're right about this. These new media creators have huge audiences. They can reach people that way. They don't have to filter their message through TV and radio and newspapers. And they feel like those medium are dying. They feel like they are increasingly irrelevant. That's something we've talked about

also. And it's convenient to them because those are also the journalists who are critically reporting on them and pushing back on a lot of the things they say. So there's a lot of competing dynamics here, but it is not entirely new. It's just, you know, the faces change and the technology changes. How much of a power struggle is there between the MAGA influencers? Because I've been so interested to see, like, who's getting chosen and who's not. You know, you mentioned Jack Spobia. and then also like who was able to kind of, I guess, hold up those Epstein binders. Once that happened, it seemed like there was a lot of kind of professional jealousy coming from other right-wing influencers online.

Have you seen like a hierarchy emerge in that online sphere? You're definitely seeing infighting. And yeah, the Epstein files was problematic in a lot of different ways, mainly because the files weren't new, right? They've been posted online years ago and, you know, they were being held up with like people smiling on their face when this was. like really serious material. But after that, you saw people like Laura Lumer saying, this is all a stunt, this is ridiculous. And so you do see a lot of, yeah, infighting, even

among the right, over methods, over doctrine, people feeling like the others are getting opportunities that I'm not getting. So you have these little policy fights that are playing out. And some of these are not just over policy, but they're also over attention and clout and money. That's going to be a factor that is going to be problematic for the Trump White House, because this is the core of people they're depending on to get their message out with a unified voice. And if they're at each other's throats and tearing each other down, that's going to be a distraction. This episode of Power User is brought to you by Delete Me. As a high-profile journalist who's dealt with stalking, harassment, and death threats,

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families stays protected. Do they have like one person like the way that the White House previously had Christian Tom under Biden? Do they have like one point person dealing with the sort of outside influencer stuff? They have a team of people that are handling different pieces of it. I don't know who specifically would be in that role, but they have a... So it's a group of people. It's not like that. Yeah, it's a group of people. But you have like a Stephen Chung and the Carolyn Levitt who are handling different pieces of it. Then there's kind of a new media core under that. So yeah, they're trying to industrialize a process here. So it's not falling on any one person. It seems like on the other side of the spectrum too. I mean,

there's been this sort of controversies, I guess, on the right about access and debates between right-wing influencers. There's also been all of this fighting within left-wing or more progressive and versus liberal influencers where I feel like after the Democrats lost in November, there was all of this soul searching of people saying, oh, you know, we need the Democrat Joe Rogan. And then you had Brian Tyler Cohen coming out in New York Times saying, oh, we're going to be that group. But it seems like so far the Democrats actually have not expanded who the creators

that they're working with. Like they're working with the same groups of creators that they worked with on the campaign trail and the same groups of creators that were, you know, the only ones not blacklisted at the end of the Biden administration. What do you make of that dynamic and sort of what's happening on the Democrat side? On the right, that was not an infrastructure that was built overnight, right? And even, you know, people like Joe Rogan, it took many years for them to become an established figure who was even getting involved in that. And even, you know, as, as you know, Joe Rogan is not explicitly political.

Or at least he wasn't before when he was getting popular. Now he's a little more. But I think that's going to be something the Democrats are trying to focus on. Adam Schiff was actually in Axios. today talking about how it's really important that the Democrats don't just talk to the people they talk to all the time, that that's a problem, that they need to change it. Whether they do anything about it, that will be something to see. The people on the left who are really good at this, people like AOC, are in the minority. And there's still a lot of people who depend on these

classic years old, you know, dependence on the legacy media, right? And expecting that the legacy media will be the only way they can get their message across. So I think you're going to probably start seeing Democrats do more podcasts, do more sports shows. But are they only going to, well, they're definitely doing more. I mean, Josh Shapiro was doing, I guess, like a bunch of sports stuff. I feel like the sports stuff they've like tried to go in there, although it reads so corny. But same with like Timothy Shalabay and his Oscars campaign. Like sports are this like easy thing that I feel like when people want to rebrand themselves, they like go on the college game day or NBA podcasts or whatever. But I'm just interested, like, from a political standpoint or from like a

cultural standpoint, it doesn't seem like they've branched out at all. And certainly they haven't engaged with like the more left-wing creators who they shunned so much, you know, during the campaign. So I just'm wondering if you think that there will be any, if you think there'll be any change there. I have no idea. I mean, there should be, right? Because, you know, you have people on the left. You have people like Hassan Piker who are very popular and they would be served well by working with people like them, I don't know what's what's in their head or what their strategy is. And to the idea of it being corny, Trump did a lot of corny stuff, right? Corny is in the eye of the beholder.

And corny works often. Trump was playing golf. He was welcoming people into Air Force One. He was going to McDonald's, right? So it really is like how you own the corny. And I think for their purpose, what they need to, I mean, what they should be doing is humanizing themselves, right? That's what we have seen worked. I don't know what they'll do.

they would be well served to see what has worked for for trump and co and emulate that but i don't know if they'll they'll be sharp enough to to follow that well one big time democrat that has kind of i guess tried to dip their toe into more of the new media ecosystem is gavin newsome recently launched a very cursed podcast where his first guest was charlie kirk i think then he's talked to steve bannon but he seems to just be wanting to talk to like some pretty extreme right wing figures um People have been posting about it, like, just historic levels of, like, missing the moment or just, like, I don't know, it seems so out of touch. Do you think sort of engaging with and sort of giving credence to even more of these far-right influencers will work out? I don't know.

I mean, it has been interesting. Gavin Newsom's foundational idea was to talk to all of America, right? And, you know, by having people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on, I mean, these are people who you can hear from in many different venues. So it's, I could tell it was like a big shock to people who they were never expected California Democrat to have these as the, again, the first people on his show to talk to. Who's the audience, though? That's the thing that I'm trying to understand. Who the hell is the audience for that podcast?

Because these right wingers already have a built-in audience. And they're basically just sort of trolling him. And he doesn't come off looking very smart in these interviews. And it's sort of like, I guess it seems to be like legitimizing these figures. but it's like, why are you legitimizing those figures to a more democratic audience? That seems like the goal of the right. So who is this podcast for? That's what I'm wondering, I guess.

That is the question, right? That is the criticism. And, you know, for somebody like Newsom, who is very clearly angling to be, you know, the 2028 nominee, it is risky, right? To have the guests on your Gavin Newsom show be some of the biggest figures on the right who are, you know, the antipathy to everything you have been. you know, voicing. So yeah, that is the risk of being the person who talks to both sides. And that, you know, that has traditionally been why Democrats have struggled because they have stayed within

their tribe. But have they? I feel like I disagree. They haven't spoken to their tribe. They won't speak to progressives. They won't speak to their base. They won't speak to any big, like, leftist podcaster, the ones that actually have cultural clout. They won't speak to Hassan Piker. They won't engage with any of those people ever. They'll engage with a very, very narrow of sort of like establishment adjacent centrist Democrats, like the Pod Save America people, really. And then it seems like now they're willing to engage the right, which, yeah, it's broadening yourself from only engaging with centrist liberals. But is that, are you broadening yourself in a way that fires up your base? I don't know. And that's kind of what I see is their tribe is the Pod Save America

people who, you know, are popular within their lane, but for whom there's a lot of different shades outside of that that they are not reaching. And you're not going to please everybody, but also to go to jump to the right so quickly, I think is an interesting strategy for them. I think it's too early to know whether it'll work. He's obviously getting a ton of flack on social media, a lot of criticism already. What I see from it, and you know, I don't have an opinion, right? I'm a reporter. But, you know, I think there was clearly a reflection on the left that they missed something big with this election by losing and that they can't just do what they've been doing in the past, which is either not going on podcast or going on podcasts in this really

constrained way where they only talked about talking points or went into friendly places. And Newsom's show, whatever it is, is a reflection that he's trying something different. But also, you know, the other criticism. But he's not going on Charlie Kirk's show, because that would be something totally different. I'm all for them going on. They should be engaging with the other side. I think that that is great. You can speak to those audiences.

There's value in going to those places. I think what's just so interesting to me is this is, I'm really interested to see who is the audience for the podcast, basically. I think the other criticism that I think is interesting too is you're at this moment where there are a lot of things to talk about with the Trump administration from the left. And there are a lot of messages that are going out there. And the Gavin Newsom show is not, let's talk. talk about those things. It's, hey, it's me, Gavin Newsom. And it's very personality driven at a time

when the rest of his party is trying to be very policy driven and very like shining a light on the things they're upset about. So that in some ways is an interesting pushback on his vision of what the influencer model should be, where he's trying to situate himself as the center of this media a universe and making it about him at a time when a lot of the party would like for them to make it about the rest of the country and the things that are happening in Washington and all of the policies they disagree with. Another thing that the Trump White House seems to be really good at is kind of inserting themselves into pop culture discussions and pop culture narratives. And the right generally seems

to be succeeding at this. I wrote a lot about, and I did a podcast episode recently too, about like the Blake lively Baldoni stuff, how that's been this like pivotal news story that the right has used to kind of dismantle, support me too. But you're really seeing the emergence of this, like, you know, if you have the bro sort of world on the right, the brocaster world, the all right pipeline for men, we're also seeing a kind of a similar ecosystem now for women and like this radicalization pipeline for the right on that side. Is the Trump White House tapping into any of that? Or are they trying to appeal to women in any specific ways? Yeah, I mean, they are. You know, And on the right, the long-term bugbear has been the feeling that the left owns academia.

They own Hollywood. They own music. You know, rightly or wrongly, there has always been kind of a chip on Republican shoulder that, you know, the liberals get to run everything. And yet, Republicans are a big part of our country, right? They are almost half the country, if not more. And so there's a feeling that like, hey, we get to own some of the culture, too. We're not just one type of person that they're trying to expand their purview or at least trying to put out that image, right? And they're using social media and they're using, you know, really popular influencers who are women who are right wing, who are very fiery.

And you have talked about some of them in your recent posts. So, you know, these are people who are trying to get big audiences that are not this classic traditional right wing bro. and trying to tap into messages that they feel like are resonant to their own lives. Yeah, I guess I'm struggling to see that from the White House as much. Like, I feel like when Barack Obama was president, like there was so much of Michelle Obama and, you know, she was doing so much to speak to women and all these women's initiatives. I guess, like, while I see it in the right-wing creator ecosystem

and the right has invested so heavily in building up targeting towards women online, I am curious if you're seeing that strategy replicated from the act, like administration. That's a good point. You haven't really seen anything on that model. There's basically like a class of MAGA celebrities that you'll see in kind of White House content often. There are people like Kid Rock, right? And Bryson DeShambot, you know, that kind of like people who you know who they are. And these are popular people, but like it's not the same as as you saw during the Obama White House. And that was kind of coming out last year during the campaign where they were like, we have Beyonce, we have Taylor Swift. Who do you have, you have Kid Rock.

And did it make a difference? Who knows? Right. Like, obviously we know who won. Well, I don't know that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are like the most relatable. Like, I mean, those are like corporate billionaire women. Yeah. But I just mean like they had those celebrities that they were holding out as like, oh, now we have Taylor Swift so the vote is over.

You mentioned in your article that the goal of the social media team in this administration is to promote Trump. as a king. How are they doing that? What does that mean? I mean, basically, Trump put out a post saying, like, I'm the king, and it got a lot of people upset. And then the social media team saw that Republicans were trolling liberals about how upset they were over that. And so they were, like, leaning into that or putting out posts where they were like AI generated-ish images of Trump with the crown, and they were putting him in all these kingly, you know, and so like, from that, the White House basically saw this is a great troll moment. we could tell how agitated the other side is.

And Trump feels like he is the king. You know, in a way he feels like he is the king, right? The early months of his presidency have included him putting out a lot of executive orders, right? Partoning his friends, doing all sorts of things that he doesn't need anybody else's approval to do. And so from the White House's perspective, they saw, one, a way to get attention, right? But also a way to build on that narrative that Trump had already started himself, where he is the strong man, he is running the show, and he's somebody you want to trust. He's somebody who is using his power in the right way. All right, Drew, well, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

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